From: rnicz@... (rnicz) Date: 2003-08-21T19:13:18+09:00 Subject: Re: Punctuation as noise "Hal E. Fulton" wrote in message news:<03b301c36744$828b2520$0300a8c0@austin.rr.com>... > I've been thinking for a day or so about > signal vs. noise,,, in source code and > perhaps in other contexts (ahem!!). > > This is just a crazy theory of mine, so > flame away if you like. > > I personally find that the more "littered" > a program is with punctuation and symbols, > the less I like to look at it. (Yes, it's > possible to have *too little* of that, but > that's rare in programming languages.) I think you would be pleased with FORTH language. In forth there is only two kinds of syntactic elements - *whitespaces* which separates *words* consisting of series of non-whitespaces. No punctuation, no keywords, no reserved words. Everything what in other programing languages is expressed using special syntactic elements in forth is achived by appropriate sequences of 'words' in Reverse Polish Notation. Every dot, star or semicolon have no other purpose as execution of piece of code! Unfortunately forth code is rather hard to read for programers used to "normal" languages. Simplicity of syntax makes forth very fast - it's parser simply recognizes words separated by whitespaces and "executes" them. I think that this is reason of your concern: simplicity of language's syntax makes interpreter's work easier - so execution of code can be faster. (For quick overview of forth look at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_programming_language) -- Best regards RNicz